How To Stop Wasting Your Life - Avoid These 5 Mistakes!

The Lead On Purpose podcast is sponsored by NZ Mortgages. Learn more at nzmortgages.co nz ever felt like time slipping through your fingers? Look. In this video, I'm going to reveal the five biggest mistakes stealing your precious moments and how you can reclaim your life starting today. Don't miss out on the secrets to living with purpose and passion. Start making every second count. Look, for those that know me and know what I talk about, I like to geek out on high performance. What is high performance? Well, consistently exceeding norms whilst maintaining healthy relationships and well being. But there's so much of your time, your precious moments being wasted. I want to share five things, mistakes that many of us do choose to chase and focus on. And if we can avoid these five things, I promise you it will make a world of difference. From people who've been running countries to small companies to professional athletes. I find these things show up in the mall and I've helped them by equipping them with just the awareness of these things. So I hope that it really serves you well. So, number one, saying yes too much. That's one of the biggest mistakes that are stealing precious moments. If you are a yes person, you are busy being busy. Please slow down. Please say no. No is great. No is great for your mental health. No is great for your priorities. No is great for your finances. You know all those things you say yes to that cost you in petrol and time and beer and food. Say no just a little more. I'm not asking you to become a monk here or be a hermit. What I am asking you to do, though, is thinking carefully about what you say yes to, both personally and professionally. When you say yes, you're making a decision. We've talked about decisions before. The word decide means to kill off all other options. When you say yes, you're killing off all other options to so many other things. Please do not make the fatal mistake of saying yes too much. Number two, the second biggest mistake that people kind of run down that avenue of is this having a to do list. Do you have a to do list? Well, it's one of the biggest mistakes you can make. I would like to challenge you on that. The most successful people I've worked with all have a different type of list. What's that list? Well, it's a success list on your to do list. Think about what's on your to do list. You might have it on your phone somewhere. You might have it written, it's on your fridge. You're going to have things that are, need or like to do and then you're going to have should do and then you'll have a couple that will be must do. I want you to take the musts, the absolute musts, and put them on a list of their own. That is your success list. If you're living your life off a to do list, you're going to be busy being busy, you'll be chronically distracted, you'll be diluting your results. Get a success list and just look at your to do list and go, what are the musts? There's lots of shoulds, coulds, like to's, but there's only a few musts. Take those across and create your very own success list. I promise you it will help you hugely. Look, just for a moment, before I share the others with you, I want to say thank you. We've been charting in the top 20 in Ireland this past couple of weeks. Great Britain, United Arab Emirates, Spain in the top 20. It's been phenomenal. And for all of our locals listeners, of course, I'm based here in Christchurch, New Zealand. Massive thank you to you guys here in New Zealand and Australia for helping us to continue charting anywhere from number one to number ten in the Bismuth management categories in Apple and Spotify. So huge thanks. If you're on YouTube, great to see you. Please hit that subscribe button. If you're on the other platforms, please do me a massive favor, hit subscribe, maybe even leave me a rating. If you're on Apple, it would be a huge help. That's my one ask of you today. Thanks a million. Okay, let's get back to it. Number three, what's the third biggest mistake that's stealing your precious moments? Well, being addicted to your phone, it's not something you maybe would have thought I would have said 25 years ago. Maybe being addicted to coffee or smoking or alcohol, one of the greatest addictions of all time in our current era. Phones, they are literally wired to grab our attention. One of my good friends, Johann Hari, has written a book called Stolen Focus. I highly recommend it. He's actually coming to New Zealand. I'll make sure my team put in the show notes, a link to go and get tickets for his amazing show. I'll see you there. If you're going up in Auckland at the end of October. But it's all around the idea that our focus has been stolen and that our attention is being diluted. So I want you to think about your ability to focus when your phone's around. How good is it? I guarantee you if you go to your screen time, it's going to give you some damning feedback. Most of us aren't operating really effectively because we're picking our phone up too much. We're jumping automatically without thinking into apps that are sucking our time, like social media apps. A few clients very recently who I've just started working with, I was like, let me see your screen time. They were shocked when they looked at it. One of them had over 20 hours of social media time a week and they're running an incredible business and they're struggling for time. So I want you to think about your phone. Here's one thing I'd love you to try and do before you arrive home. If you say, don't work from home before you arrive home, take your phone, do your last emails before you walk in the door. As soon as you get in, put it somewhere in a drawer that you can't see, or in a different room or in a different floor. And then at night, put your phone in a different room. If it's your alarm, get an old school alarm or set your watch up to go off instead of your phone, disable your watch. See, people have these notifications on their watch. I'm like, why would you do that? Don't let these systems take away your focus and attention. I promise you, you do not need notifications on your watch. You really don't need to know when an email comes in. I want you to be proactive in going to seek the email when it suits you. Make that block time, that chunk time. Do not be distracted every time you get a little ding. It takes you 23 minutes on average. Studies have backed this up, 23 minutes to get back to being fully engaged and focused in whatever you were doing prior. If you're getting a little ding or a buzz or reminder every three to seven minutes, you don't have one hour during the day where you're fully engaged. So please consider it number four. The other big mistake that's stealing your precious moments in life. Lacking emotional awareness. When was the last time you blew up, flew off the handle, overreacted, sat in a huff? Give someone the cold shoulder treatment? Said something you kind of wished you didn't say? Look, I imagine if you're human, it was probably in the last week or two. That's a sign that there's room for emotional awareness growth. I'm constantly asking myself, where can I level up? And it's generally where I feel my triggers or my buttons being pushed. We've got to become aware of it the first thing that I'm going to recommend, it's from the great Dr. Brene Brown, is what are the emotions that you're feeling? Can you label them? A friend of mine sat down recently with me. We're talking about anger. And I was like, look, I don't like anger. I like to push away from anger. I want to move towards joy. And we were chatting about actually the importance of it. And he raised an important point. Anger is really important. We're not to abuse anger, but actually we're allowed to feel it and you need to label it. So I'm going to ask you just to do that. Label your emotions. I am. Angry, sad, excited, anxious, worried, joyous. I want you just to get confident with being able to label your emotions. A study recently done, 500 people, suggested at the end of that study that people could only name three emotions and it was anger, sadness and happiness. That was it. Anger, sadness and happiness. That's number three. There's 87 different emotions. So for to be more aware and to move away from that lack of emotional awareness, we need to start labeling our emotions. That's my simple challenge for you today, is be able to go, how am I feeling right now? Maybe you're on your way to work. I know a lot of you listen to this on the way to work, so you might be excited, you might be bored, you might be scared, you might be hopeful. Some of you listen to this when you're running in the hills. So you might be relaxed, you might be curious as to what we're talking about and how you might apply these lessons to your life so that there's way less regret, there's way more purpose and passion. So I want you to think about that. Last but not least, number five, the big. I think this is one of the biggest, arguably the biggest mistake that most of us make is that we are constantly chasing happy. We want to be happy, we want our friends to be happy. If we have kids, we want them to be happy. What is it you want for your kids? Oh, just to be happy. I think it's the biggest mistake you can make. We should not chase it down as a destination. Happiness is not a destination, it's a direction. I was asked to deliver a keynote on this in London last month, the month before. And I started to think deeply about it, started to research it and read the papers around happiness and happy. It's not something that we attain, it's something we move towards and become happier. So I want you to think about this in the Pursuit of enjoyment, you feel happier. In the pursuit of satisfaction, you feel happier. And in the pursuit of purpose or meaning, you're happier. That's all I want you to think about is am I doing things? Am I pursuing them that bring me some enjoyment, satisfaction or meaning? That's what's going to bring happiness, not chasing a happy feeling of I'll get the new iPhone, I'll buy the house, I'll pay the mortgage down, I'll go to Louis Vuitton and get the thing, I'll do the big holiday. That's not what creates happy. What creates the feeling of happiness and deep sense of happiness is the pursuit of those three things. The pursuit of enjoyment through hobbies, sport, time spent with people, eating great food. The time pursuing satisfaction. How do we get satisfied by doing hard things? Climb the hill, get your butt up that hill. It's going to be hard. Great. Sweat a bit, get to the gym, do the HIIT workout. It's uncomfortable, it's not fun. But that's where we feel satisfaction is when we're doing hard things, we get to the end, we feel the satisfaction. Do the 20 sales calls. Apply for the job you think you're not qualified for. Go do it. Pursue it. You will be happier as a product. And last but not least, there, pursuing something with meaning. You know, something that's bigger than you, that has an impact on others. To me, that's crucial. So just to sum it all up for you, the five biggest mistakes. Stealing your precious moments. Number one, saying yes, too much. Number two, having a to do list. Number three, being addicted to your phone. Number four, lacking emotional awareness. And last but not least, number five, chasing happy. Avoid all those things. Consider doing some of those other things that I've shared. I hope this has really landed for you. And just giving you some food for thought right now. Looking forward to seeing you on our next episode. We've got an incredible guest coming up, but for now, please get out there and lead your life on purpose. The Lead on Purpose podcast is sponsored by NZ Mortgages. Learn more at NZMortgages Co NZ.